Levinson Explores Why America Is America

Names & faces

November 3, 1990|By Glenn Lovellsan, Jose Mercury News

DETERMINATION AND PERSONAL VISION — these are the qualities that continue to define Barry Levinson, Baltimore's best-known chronicler.

After his Oscar win for Rain Man in 1989, Levinson could have had the proverbial store. Instead of joining the ranks of the superstar directors - the Spielbergs and Zemeckises - Levinson returned to his Baltimore memoirs, begun with Diner and continued through Tin Men and now Avalon.

''It really didn't matter what I was offered after Rain Man because I was going to do Avalon,'' he says during a stopover in San Francisco. ''Avalon was the thing that I wrote all during the time of the (Oscar) nominations and after I got the Academy Award. That was going to be the next film.''

Besides, the awards, the self-aggrandizement are a trap, he says. ''There's nothing worse than celebrating yourself . . . getting caught up in the hoopla. If you enjoy making films and you have certain things in mind, you pursue those things. Once you start chasing (notoriety) you get further away from what motivates you.''

What motivates - no, consumes - Levinson is the past. Where we came from as a nation. Why we turned out the way we did. What role his family - the slightly fictionalized Krichinsky clan in Avalon - played in the pageant of assimilation.

Levinson, 47, remains dedicated to a career split equally between big studio assignments (The Natural, Young Sherlock Holmes) and autobiographical projects. Avalon, described as his grandfather's ''mind's eye view of the past,'' definitely will not be his last return to the old neighborhood.

''I've been fiddling with something that would go in another direction. I'm not sure what it'll be about; it's still in my head. But, yes, it will be set in Baltimore.''

Some refer to Levinson's career as schizoid, eclectic. Levinson prefers to look at it as fascinating, varied. ''I like to do the movies I consider more personal - call them semiautobiographical - and the others. I like the mix because my interests are all over.''

For Levinson Avalon is more about ''that quest for assimilation'' than a personal family portrait. In terms of audience appeal, this slow wearing down of Old World values is hardly up there with an airport held hostage or a comic-strip cop clowned by Warren Beatty. Levinson, who has withstood more than his share of withering stares from studio brass, realizes this. The public pays to be ''bombarded,'' he laments.

Which is why movies like Avalon will soon be as extinct as close-knit families like the Krichinskys. ''Look,'' Levinson continues, ''there are very few films like Avalon being made, and I think in time there will be fewer, until, in 15 to 20 years, they no longer exist. I don't think I'm being pessimistic about this. Movies that are more personal, more relationship-oriented, will, I think, eventually fade away.''